By The Intrepid in News — 09 May 2025

Still Here: A Salute to the Un-Erased

To the menopunks, the pro-aging rebels, and everyone who refuses to vanish

“If the system never wanted you loud, visible, or wise—be all three. Then make a zine about it.”

There’s a storm gathering—not one of spectacle, but of memory. You won’t hear it on morning talk shows or see it in glossy media spreads. It rumbles beneath the algorithm, where the forgotten keep showing up anyway. It’s the sound of refusal: the hiss of a cassette tape rewinding, the whir of a drone being flipped off, the laugh of someone who’s been told to fade but instead carved themselves back into the story.

This is a salute—not to youth, not to reinvention, but to those who refuse erasure. To those whose presence challenges the systems that decided long ago they were expendable. To the crows, the crones, the kidults, the archivists of rage and beauty who were left out of the script and built their own stage.

Refusing the Edit

Erasure is not the enemy—it is the tool.
The enemy is the system that decides whose lives are legible, whose stories get airtime, and whose presence is permitted.

Erasure is how these systems—capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy—do their work. Not through fire, but silence. Not by conflict, but by omission.

This post is a gesture of respect to those who see the lie, feel the disappearance tightening around them, and say: No. Not me. Not today.

Who We're Honoring

This is for the crew behind crone_culture, who use their platform to challenge the tyranny of the anti-aging lie. Their posts aren’t branding—they’re revolt. They remind us that aging isn’t a flaw; it’s a continuation. Every wrinkle is a record. Every grey hair, an annotation. They don’t smooth the story—they sharpen it.

And to the riotous brilliance of Menopunks, a documentary and movement that reclaims menopause as power. Not a whisper, not a phase. A signal flare. Menopunks isn’t content to be understood—it demands to be felt. These are women telling their truth with feedback fuzz and full-volume hot flashes. They aren’t asking for inclusion; they’re rewriting the terms.

These voices don’t just resist aging’s commodification. They resist the enforced forgetting that follows it. That’s the work. That’s the defiance. That’s the un-erasing.

The Gen X Reckoning: Aging Without a Map

Picture this: It’s 2025, and the first Gen Xers are hitting retirement age. That’s not irony—it’s a reckoning.

Raised on TV static and system failure, Gen X learned early that no one was coming to save them. So they adapted. Shrugged. Ghosted. And now, they’re entering the age of social irrelevance with no pension, no glossy narrative, and no interest in aging gracefully.

This is the generation that was never centered, so they stopped expecting it. But erasure was never passive. It was applied. And now, at the far end of a long quiet, they’re speaking anyway. Not for validation, but for the record.

No AARP glow-ups. No spiritual bypassing. Just a growing number of people saying:

“We’re still here. And we’re keeping the receipts.”

The Crow Never Forgets

Crows remember faces. They warn each other. They hold grudges across generations. In the mythology of the Crone Front, the crow isn’t a mascot—it’s a sigil of un-erasable memory.

Picture it: a crow flipping off a drone, wings outstretched against the sky. Surveillance above. Resistance below. The crow doesn’t flee the gaze—it stares back. Sharp-eyed. Sharp-tongued.

This is for those who’ve been misfiled, misnamed, or left off the guest list. The Continuously Disillusioned. The High-Functioning Kidults. The menopunks and memory workers. The crow is for you. Because:

We weren’t meant to last in this system.
But we remember.
And we never left.

Hot Topic as Cultural Memory

In 1999, Le Tigre dropped Hot Topic, a frenetic love letter to artists, queers, feminists, and weirdos. It wasn’t a hit parade—it was a naming ritual. A ward against cultural erasure.

Listening now, Hot Topic feels like prophecy. It reminds us: to be named is to be remembered. And today, the spirit of that track lives in projects like crone_culture and Menopunks. They’re naming the stages that were once hidden. They’re naming the power that comes after the market stops calling your name.

Hot Topic said remember.
Crone_culture says resist.
Menopunks say riot.
Together, they form a living archive of defiant presence.

A Playbook for the Un-Erased

So what do we do with this energy? How do we show up for those resisting disappearance?

Here’s a field guide:

Amplify memory. Share the work of those pushed to the margins. Don’t just repost—contextualize. Archive. Echo.
Name erasure when you see it. That “anti-aging” ad? That list with no elders? That panel without survivors? Call it.
Make your own ritual of remembrance. Create your crest, your playlist, your collage of the people they tried to forget. Make presence visible again.
Be the witness. Not the hero. Not the savior. Just someone who saw, and refused to let it be buried.

This is not about nostalgia. This is about truth-telling. And if you’ve ever felt yourself being edited out of your own life—you know this is sacred work.

Signing Off (For Now)

“Age didn’t buy us wisdom. We never had respect. And we’re still tired.”

But we’ve still got the funk. The fire. The files.
We’ve got the names.
We’ve got the memory.
And we are not letting go of the thread.

Raise a fist. Raise a crow. Raise your voice.
Refuse to vanish. Refuse to forget. Refuse to be erased.